The invention relates to image quality adjustments and more particularly, to customer schedulable machine quality adjustment in an image reproduction machine.
It is important in the operation of complex electronic equipment such as reproduction machines to maintain the quality of the finished copy sheets. Today's copiers must routinely perform a copy quality (CQ) check to insure that copies will be of the highest quality for the customer. Due to process control requirements, these copy quality checks may occur several times a day. The time when these CQ checks are performed may interrupt the customer's use of the copier for several minutes. This can not only be annoying and inconvenient for the operator, but may impede machine productivity as well. It is important for machine efficiency to minimize the time spent in these CQ checks and adjustments, especially during peak productivity periods. The need for quality adjustments becomes even more crucial in machines adapted for highlight color or full color reproductions since these machines often require more extensive or more frequent analysis and correction to produce a quality color product.
It is known in prior art machines for the machine to cycle down in the middle of a reproduction job to initiate a needed copy quality adjustment. Sometimes manual operator intervention is needed to initiate the quality adjustment or to cycle up and return the machine from the adjustment phase to resume completing the reproduction job. This type of required operator attention is particularly inefficient. In addition, it is known in the prior art for example in D/92323, U.S. Ser. No. 07/940,257 to provide a plurality of time delays for adjusting the quality of the image processing apparatus. The time delays include immediately adjusting the quality of the image processing during a current job run, automatically adjusting the quality of the image processing apparatus upon completion of a current job run, and automatically adjusting the quality of the image processing apparatus upon a predetermined time delay depending upon job requirements after completion of a current job. Also, in prior art machines, the machine may simply cycle down after completion of a job when a quality adjustment is needed and require operator initiation of the quality adjustment.
While quality adjustments are necessary to maintain machine quality standards, a truly productive machine must minimize machine downtime for quality checks during peak productivity hours. It would be desirable, therefore, to minimize machine lost productivity during machine quality adjustments. It would also be desirable to be able to automatically initiate a quality adjustment at preset times of known machine inactivity and machine non use. It would also be desirable to allow a machine key operator to selectively set quality adjustments depending upon the nature of the operation or usage demand for a given machine.
It is an object of the present invention, therefore, to provide a new and improved technique to make quality adjustments and corrections in an imaging machine without unnecessary machine downtime. It is still another object of the present invention to be able to selectively schedule the time of copy quality adjustments for a given machine, dependent upon the history or statistical analysis of machine usage and operator demand. Other advantages of the present invention will become apparent as the following description proceeds, and the features characterizing the invention will be pointed out with particularity in the claims annexed to and forming a part of this specification.